In computer storage systems (also referred to herein as storage subsystems), disk partitioning and logical volume management are used to manage physical storage devices such as hard disk drives. In disk partitioning, a single storage device is divided into multiple logical storage units referred to as partitions, thereby treating one physical storage device as if it were multiple disks. Logical volume management provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, stripe together or otherwise combine regions (a region, also referred to herein as a partition, is a sequence of bytes having a specific length, typically one megabyte) into larger virtual regions that administrators can re-size or move, potentially without interrupting system use.
To manage a given volume, a partition table can be utilized to define the relationship between a logical address of a logical volume and physical regions (also known as blocks and partitions) on the physical storage device. Upon receiving a request to perform an input/output (I/O) operation at a specific logical address in the given volume, a storage system can utilize the partition table identify the physical location on a storage device that corresponds to the specific logical address.
The description above is presented as a general overview of related art in this field and should not be construed as an admission that any of the information it contains constitutes prior art against the present patent application.